SEO query

• perenault

  said

  Hi,

  The Home page is made of 4 different pages. What is the impact of this in SEO, do we have a problem of duplicate content between the Home and the separate pages?

  thanks a lot .. I actually put a Noindex meta on one page thinking google was going to take the Home as the only useful one… result : I was on 3rd page, now, just disappeared !!

• jeffw

  said

  The Home page is made of 4 different pages. What is the impact of this in SEO, do we have a problem of duplicate content between the Home and the separate pages?

  You’ve been reading too many SEO articles written by self-proclaimed “experts”. The sort of duplicate content you are talking about here is no issue at all; never was, never will be. And anyway, Google does not penalise duplicate content, if it finds exact or very near duplicate content on a sngle website then all that will happen is that Google may index only one of the pages.

  I actually put a Noindex meta on one page thinking google was going to take the Home as the only useful one… result : I was on 3rd page, now, just disappeared !!

  And in a little while it will reappear. There is a ton of good advice on the Google website, including about SEO, here:

  http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

  And here:

  http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en//webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf?cbid=843982610&cbrank=0

  In my experience if you follow Google’s best practices advice there will be no need to give yourself a headache trying to understand all these unnecessary and frankly useless “SEO” plugins that there are for WordPress.

  Content is king.

• perenault

  said

  LOL jeff ! you rock ! i removed the noindex and i am sure indeed that i will come back on track !

  As you say, i am spending too much time on this non sense…

• jeffw

  said

  You’ve got the idea, perenault. Spend all of your time creating unique and valuable content. If more people did this rather than wasting their time playing with stupid SEO tools that actually do nothing, then they would get better page rankings faster. It is all about the content. Everything else is just humbug.

• rastarr

  said

  Yes and No

  There is also the aspect of what displays in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Page).
  As an example, people are more likely to click on your SERP if it reads well as opposed to some preamble that Google drags in.
  I agree that Content is King however you also need people to click on a search result as well. This is where some of the functionality of SEO plugins can be helpful.
  I spend time creating unique and valuable content as well as ensuring that content conforms to best practises to get that SERP click

• jeffw

  said

  Google mostly uses snippets of its own devising even if you specifically set a meta description for a page. This is just a simple fact. Setting specific meta description tags for web pages is all fine and dandy if you have a small site, but if you have thousands of pages then it really is not worth the time involved. Most people never get past the page title before they click on a link. After content, the page title is the most important thing on a web page.

• rastarr

  said

  Yep, page title is the next one after content.

• jeffw

  said

  What we need instead of all these bloated “SEO” plugins is a simple little plugin that enables us to manually set page title and meta description for any page, should we want to. Now that’s a plugin that even I might find useful.

• rastarr

  said

  I use Wordpress SEO for that

• jeffw

  said

  Ah but it’s all the other unnecessary stuff. It makes people think that it is all very very important and that they have to focus on all this techie stuff in order to make their web pages climb up the Google rankings, and then they spend all their time fiddling with all the different switches and knobs hoping that one day they will just happen across the perfect combination of settings that will lift their web page to #1 in Google. If only they would spend the same amount of time and effort on producing genuinely unique and valuable content.

• rastarr

  said

  I doesn’t have to be that way with this plugin. Set the option you want enabled and forget it.
  The only areas I actively use, on a day to day basis, is the SERP snippet which is the page title and the meta description.
  Job done.

• jeffw

  said

  I understand that. My point is that while illuminated people such as yourself are able to ignore the chaff, very many people who are not so illuminated get easily sucked in by all the hyperbole. The mere presence of all the unnecessary chaff gives that chaff an importance way beyond its worth.

• tom.eagles

  said

  Both of you are spot on. One site i created using WP and Mingle reached the top 10 in google in a week. Whilst content is the key, well written content is even more important, I try to write content that contains phrases and words that people would enter into google when searching bringing better organic search results. The SEO plugin by Joast whilst somewhat bloated allows you to generate great excerpts that replace those that google generates when creating a link to your site on the results page. The only other major factor that hasnt been mentioned here is getting your site linked from highly relevant external sites. For example a language school placing adverts that use well optimised content on a highly ranked advertising site. As jeff pointed out there are some pretty useless tools out there that people think are going to provide miracles. People tend to forget one of the best ways to get top results is the most simple of all, choose the right domain name to start with. for example http://www.wordpresscustomisationservice.com how many times have you seen something like this? but if you did something as simple as http://www.wordpress-customisation-service.com boom you are already looking at great results without even getting content into the equation. it amazes me the amount of people that still dont use seo optimised titles as mentioned here or optimised permalinks.

  Too many people expect instant results and keep tweeking and modifying pages without waiting for the results or install plugins or buy seo software. I tried one of the best sellers on a friends PC to analyse my site. It told me that the pages i chose had a 1% chance of making the top 10 with the keywords i was using, The funny thing was that the pages were already #1 in google.

• jeffw

  said

  Hyphens in domain names are unnecessary as Google will always parse out the keywords. The only exception to this might be if there was some ambiguity in the unhyphenated name. Keep in mind that hyphens in domain names make it difficult for you give out your domain name over the phone. And hyphens in domain names have zero effect on page ranking. A keyword rich domain name will get you a teensy weensy tiny little bit of googlejuice, hypens or not.

  Just create great content. Everything else is humbug.